Fighting the misinformation pandemic: Here’s help teaching students to distinguish real news from what’s fake - The Washington Post

Fighting the misinformation pandemic: Here’s help teaching students to distinguish real news from what’s fake - The Washington Post

Fighting the misinformation pandemic: Here’s help teaching students to distinguish real news from what’s fake

If you don’t know what the News Literacy Project is and does, it’s time you do.

Founded over a decade ago by Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the News Literacy Project aims to do something that schools everywhere should be doing: teaching students how to distinguish what’s real and fake in the age of digital communication — and at a time when the president of the United States routinely denounces real news as “fake,” and Americans will be voting on a new president in 2020.

Miller’s enterprise grows every year as teachers increasingly look for resources to teach their students how to evaluate the credibility of information. It has become the leading provider of news literacy education in the country, if not around the world.

The project creates digital curriculum and other resources and works with educators and journalists to teach middle school and high school students how to recognize news and information to trust — and provides them with the tools they need to be informed and engaged participants in a democracy. It uses the standards of quality journalism as an aspirational yardstick against which to measure all news and information. And, just as important, it provides the next generation with an appreciation of the First Amendment and the role of a free press.

“As a result,” Miller said, “NLP is on the front lines combating the misinformation pandemic that threatens to undermine civic life in the United States and around the globe.”

A sample of the project’s work is below, and I plan to publish some every week as a resource for teachers and anybody else who wants to become news literate.

The reach of the News Literacy Project is vast. It has had national success with Checkology virtual classroom, an innovative, award-winning, cutting-edge online platform featuring interactive, real-world lessons. Since launching in May 2016, more than 20,000 educators have registered to use Checkology in social studies, history, government, English and journalism classes with more than 133,000 students in every state. Educators in 110 other countries have registered to use it, as well.

The New York Department of Education has purchased 68,000 student licenses for use this year in 174 middle schools as part of a five-year agreement with the project. And West Virginia is seeding Checkology in school districts in five counties, while Columbia, Mo., has purchased 3,000 licenses and Miami-Dade County is using 1,000. The Los Angeles Unified School District will pilot the platform in 20 middle schools in early 2020. You can see short videos that capture Checkology’s impact in one CONTINUE READING: Fighting the misinformation pandemic: Here’s help teaching students to distinguish real news from what’s fake - The Washington Post